New England Gothic

Something between a point-and-click and a text adventure, which is suspicious in itself. New England Gothic from 1992 simply doesn't know what it wants to be — and that's not a compliment.

You wander through 1990s New England, where something dark and ancient lingers. The mechanics are straightforward: you click on places, read text passages, collect items, try combining them. The graphics are bleak — those pixelart scenes that are neither detailed enough to captivate nor abstract enough to leave room for imagination. Colors like they came from a computer that had given up trying.

Playing feels like walking through a desert. You click, read a description that drones on like a professor who can't afford brevity. Navigation through the game world is confusing, the logic of item combinations borders on magic. Worst is the waiting — machine time between actions gives you plenty of room to wonder why you're sitting at a computer instead of reading an actual Gothic novel.

New England Gothic strives for atmosphere, but atmosphere needs something to bite into. Here it dissolves into gray tedium. The game has ambitions for a story, but a story without pacing is just a list of things that happened. There's neither horror nor mystery — just mouse-clicking and text-reading.

Today you'll click through it more out of historical interest than wanting entertainment. Try it in your browser when you've got twenty minutes to figure out why you only remember it was boring.